“Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.”
~ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The root of the problem

Despite modern man’s unparalleled ability to gather and synthesize mountains of data on climate change and other growing dangers, he is helpless to stop the inevitable and well-worn trajectory that all previous complex societies have followed. This time, however, is different in that the scale of environmental overshoot is planet-wide – the world’s oceans are becoming too acidic to sustain life, the soil too eroded and degraded to grow food, and the atmosphere too polluted with heat-trapping gasses. As the green mantle of the Earth is swallowed up in the geologic blink of an eye, eon-long processes of plant and animal evolution are stopped dead in their tracks. Of all the horrors modern civilization has brought forth, the most damaging and longest-lasting legacy is the wholesale loss of genetic and species diversity. Global ecocide is certain suicide.

Faith in technology and “free market” capitalism to solve the planet’s ills has already proven to be a very dangerous and faulty belief. Politicians are always looking for easy solutions to complex problems, and they see technology as the mechanism by which to reconcile endless growth on a finite planet. Public Relations and greenwashing are all-pervasive. Science has been privatized to the highest bidder. Essentially, those who are anti-environmental and those who claim to be environmentalists are both proponents of the same omnicidal death machine. One recognizes that fossil fuels are indispensable to industrial civilization while discounting or refuting anthropogenic climate disruption(ACD). The other acknowledges the reality of ACD but falsely believes that “renewable energy technologies” can harmlessly supplant carbon-based energy sources. In both cases, neither can accept that the root of the problem is capitalist industrial civilization. Neither the anti-greens nor the faux environmentalists are willing to give up their globetrotting airline flights, sprawling suburbia and car culture, oversized McMansions, overprocessed fast food, virtual world of cyberspace and all the rest of their energy-intensive, unsustainable way of living:

…This“standard of living”is a product of an alienated society in which consumption for the sake of consumption is the new god. In a grow-or-die economy, production and consumption must keep increasing to prevent economic collapse. This need for growth leads to massive advertising campaigns to indoctrinate people with the capitalist theology that more and more must be consumed to find “happiness” (salvation), producing consumerist attitudes that feed into an already-present tendency to consume in order to compensate for doing boring, pointless work in a hierarchical workplace. Unless a transformation of values occurs that recognises the importance oflivingas opposed toconsuming,the ecological crisiswillget worse. It’s impossible to imagine such a radical transformation occurring under capitalism, whose lifeblood is consumption for the sake of consumption…

…As Murray Bookchin argues,“If we live in a ‘grow-or-die’ capitalistic society in which accumulation is literally a law of economic survival and competition is the motor of ‘progress,’ anything we have to say about population causing the ecological crisis is basically meaningless. Under such a society the biosphere will eventually be destroyed whether five billion or fifty million people live on the planet”[“The Population Myth”inWhich Way for the Ecology Movement?, p. 34]… – link

Civilization is not in of itself evil; the problem lies in how it is organized and functions. Capitalism encourages the unregulated growth of gigantic corporations that exploit the environment and people, create economic disparity, promote hyper-consumerism, and usurp and corrupt governments. In addition to using military might for exploiting foreign resources and pools of labor, capitalism encourage war for the sole purpose of profit, i.e the military industrial complex. It also encourages overpopulation by the gross maldistribution of wealth:

…There is an inverse relationship between per capita income and the fertility rate — as poverty decreases, so do the population rates. When people are ground into the dirt by poverty, education falls, women’s rights decrease, and contraception is less available. Having children then becomes virtually the only creative outlet, with people resting their hopes for a better future in their offspring. Therefore social conditions have a major impact on population growth. In countries with higher economic and cultural levels, population growth soon starts to fall off. Today, for example, much of Europe has seen birth rates fall beyond the national replacement rate. This is the case even in Catholic countries, which one would imagine would have religious factors encouraging large families.

To be clear, we are not saying that overpopulation is not a very serious problem. Obviously, population growth cannot be ignored or solutions put off until capitalism is eliminated. We need to immediately provide better education and access to contraceptives across the planet as well as raising cultural levels and increasing women’s rights in order to combat overpopulation, which only benefits the elite by keeping the cost of labour low in addition to fighting for land reform, union organising and so on. However, the “population explosion” is not a neutral theory, and its invention and continual use is due to its utility to vested interests. We should not be fooled by them into thinking that overpopulation is the main cause of the ecological crisis, as this is a strategy for distracting people from the root-cause of both ecological destruction and population growth: namely, the capitalist economy and hierarchical social relationships it requires. – link

Those communities that are the most discriminated against and disenfranchised will be the first to erupt in violence as the social fabric is stretched to the breaking point. The city of Ferguson, Missouri experienced ‘white flight’ since 1990 which changed its demographics, creating a majority of African-American residents but with whites still dominating the institutions governing the city. The racially charged social unrest in Ferguson has its roots in the rapacious system of capitalism. Several policies and effects of neoliberal capitalism worked to drain wealth and opportunity away from Ferguson: “outsourcing of American industry, the housing bubble and credit crunch, and education reform and privatization”. In addition, the militarization of local law enforcement and targeting of African-Americans with fines to fund the police department is another tactic of rogue capitalism preying upon the poor:

Emerson Electric, the dominant employer in the area, offshored its production little by little over time to foreign factories with cheap labor.

Mortgage lenders targeted predominantly black and Hispanic areas for the highest-risk, highest-cost types of mortgage loans, such as adjustable-rate mortgages and loans with high prepayment penalties. This led to higher-than-average default rates, according to the Housing Commission established by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

The mayor of Ferguson and its all-white city council then collaborated to keep property values low around the historic district for reinvestment and redevelopment.

On the basis of its state test scores, the impoverished Normandy School District where Michael Brown attended was declared a failure and its accreditation was pulled by the state. Because of this, Normandy School District was obligated to pay for the transfer of its students to other wealthier schools. (This is one of the schemes of the privatization of education and “school shopping” that the state is using rather than funding and providing resources to these schools.) The costs of student transfer bankrupted Normandy School District, so the state then dissolved the district and created a new one which it exempted from accreditation so that students would no longer be allowed to transfer out to other better-funded schools. The pipeline from such poverty-stricken, failed educational systems to prisons–many of which are for profit–is direct.

The militarization of the domestic police force in the U.S. has been occurring for several decades and is in line with the ever-increasing militarism of America’s foreign policy. With the entire globe now treated as a battlefield in the ‘War on Terror’, summary executions can be carried out by remote-controlled drone aircraft. Americans have now joined the ranks of those in South America, the Middle East and the rest of the Third World who have been exploited by the neo-coloniali exploitation of U.S. corporations over the last century. As the economy fails to ‘improve’ and global unrest becomes more frequent, the brutality of a fascist corporate state will reveal itself right here at home in more overt ways. The growing police state in America is the response by those planning to protect their elite positions at the top of the capitalist hierarchy in this corrupt state of ever-widening wealth disparity, resource depletion, and environmental collapse:

Predicting that it is “highly likely that megacities [described as metropolitan areas with populations of more than 10 million] will be the strategic key terrain in any future crisis that requires U.S. military intervention,” the report reveals that the Pentagon has conducted “case studies” and “field work” in preparation for such interventions in: Dhaka, Bangladesh; Lagos, Nigeria; Bangkok, Thailand; Mexico City, Mexico, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil … and New York City.

Describing the conditions that it anticipates will require US military intervention, the report warns, “As inequality between rich and poor increases … Stagnation will coexist with unprecedented development, as slums and shanty towns rapidly expand alongside modern high-rises. This is the urban future.”

“Radical income disparity,” is further described as the foremost “driver of instability” in these far-flung urban areas.

In other words, the Pentagon brass is seeking to prepare the US military for directly counterrevolutionary interventions aimed at quelling popular revolts that it sees as the inevitable consequence of the unprecedented social inequality created by world capitalism in crisis… – link

As reported by Cyrano’s Journal Today, the Obama administration’s call to review U.S. government funding of military equipment for local/state police departments is simply a PR ploy to calm the nerves of uneasy Americans. In reality, the U.S. government will work to normalize and standardize the militarization of domestic law enforcement:

…The aim of the Obama administration’s review—beyond being a public relations exercise—will be to cut down on such unprofessional displays and make the use of domestic military police more systematic, widespread and regular. In this it will be similar to the administration’s reviews of its domestic spying programs, each of which has only resulted in the extension of illegal spying by the US intelligence agencies.

Far from acting as a restraining influence on local police departments, the federal government has been the most active facilitator of police militarization. In June, the American Civil Liberties Union released a report entitled “War comes home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” which concluded that “the federal government has justified and encouraged the militarization of local law enforcement.”…

To add insult to injury, the Ferguson police made it a practice to feed off the poor by filling its coffers with millions of dollars in fines and court fees that it collected by specifically targeting and harassing African-Americans. I seldom quote ZeroHedge here because it is pro-capitalist and attributes all social and economic problems to Federal Reserve monetary policies rather that correctly placing the blame on the inherent workings of capitalism, but I did read an informative article from them on the scale of poverty that is affecting not only Ferguson, but all major metropolitan areas in the U.S.:

The biggest concern, however, is that Ferguson is merely the canary in the coalmine. According to Brookings, within the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, the number of suburban neighborhoods where more than 20 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line more than doubled between 2000 and 2008-2012. Almost every major metro area saw suburban poverty not only grow during the 2000s but also become more concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods. By 2008-2012, 38 percent of poor residents in the suburbs lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. For poor black residents in those communities, the figure was 53 percent.

A long history of colonialism, slavery, and racism underlies the economic, political, and social disenfranchisement of African-Americans today in communities like Ferguson. Their exploitation has been institutionalized, and thus deemed acceptable.

We’re just an extra in this global reality freak show

The world certainly appears to becoming much more unstable with Russia and the Ukraine flirting with nuclear war, barbaric decapitations at an all time high in the perpetually destabilized Middle East, the failure of Japan’s ice wall to stop its radioactive clusterfuck fallout, redneck commando wannabes of America’s local police departments running roughshod over those they are sworn to “protect”, the Wall Street Casino Royale reaching all-time highs as average Americans get new lone shark PayDay loans to pay their previous lone shark PayDay loans, and our corporate overlords celebrating even higher profits while paying even less taxes. And while this circus of humanity plays out, both poles continue their meltdown with new outgassings of methane promising to wipe us out with one monstrous belch.

The techno-utopians will continue their crusade to save mankind from himself. The free market fundamentalists will seek comfort in the fantasy that Adam’s Smith’s invisible hand will fix everything. The climate change deniers will continue to rationalize the increasingly destabilized biosphere as a new normal that has happened before. The things we know that should be done to save ourselves are only philosophical narratives running in our head, never to see the light of day. All you can do is watch it all unfold because this reality freak show is global and you’re just an extra in it, whether you want to be or not. After all, I don’t think any of us are completely free from some sort of delusion. If we were, we wouldn’t be human.

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century. A lecture by Harald Welzer

If you can get past his broken english he makes some interesting points. As an anthropologist he realized that the majority of the climate research was scientific number crunching and little or no perspective from the humanities. What will be the nature of violent conflict in an increasingly desperate world?

The lecture starts with his observations from a study done of transcripts from WWII German prisoner of war who’s cells were bugged by their British and American captors and their casual conversations about atrocities recorded.

Turns out the average German soldier cared little for the Nazi ideology. They actually disliked filling trenches with murdered Jews and watching their Soviet counterparts starve to death in concentration camps. What did any of that have to do with war? Whereas summary executions of Soviet soldiers on the battlefield and burning villages full of women and children “partisans” was OK because that was all part of “the job” of being at war.

Perhaps our actions, even the most brutal and violent, have less to do with ideology and indoctrination than they do with just getting along in whatever situation we happen to find ourselves in.

Interesting video but his English is essentially flawless and although he has a noticeable accent, it’s no more intrusive than the accents of many native-speakers. I’m sorry if this seems like hair-splitting but describing someone giving a high-level lecture in a foreign language as having ‘broken English’ is seriously provincial and it’s something which really gets on my tits.

There were more than a few spots where I had a difficult time understanding what he was trying to say. Nothing provincial about that. I would have no problem being misunderstood by native German speakers if I tried to lecture in German, and I certainly wouldn’t take it personally.

Other than that, do you have anything interesting or original to contribute to the discussion?

Dan is completely correct – the absurdity of calling this German-native speaker’s wonderful command of English “broken English” is stupefying. The man is practically fluent, much better in his expressive use of English than most solely-English-speaking PROFESSORS.
However, that was an excellent snag and contribution by you, so don’t take this comments-section rebuke too hard.

I enjoyed watching that. Seems like there were about twelve people in the audience and one was an economist trying to gain consensus for his BAU views. I think that the thinking, rational portion of the brain is fully in service to satisfying the lower brain structures and getting an immediate or near term chemical reward. Buying an SUV “now” is simply more important to the motivational centers than the harmful consequences of the carbon dioxide it will produce. Now, if you could run a hose from the tailpipe into the car’s interior for example, for those familiar with the effects of breathing too much carbon monoxide, the amygdala would start alarming the reptile within the car immediately and override any perceived reward from owning the SUV. On the other hand, if the exhaust can be “harmlessly” vented into the atmosphere, the dopamine released by owning the SUV is free for the taking. Unfortunately, repeat this by hundreds of millions of times over many decades and you end up with the same result, everyone in the car is dead.

The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg essentially agrees with you, but gives a go at imagining a variety of eventualities….desperation? Most “environmentalists”, perhaps, in trying to halt GHG emissions with renewable energy sources certainly need to address radical lowering of consumption (demand for energy), not just replace the exponential growth of energy demand with “clean-er” technology.

Well done,Mike.
I’m certainly not a defender of capitalism,as I think from all angles it is making our current situation worse more quickly,but the more basic problem is industrial civilisation.The climate system doesn’t differentiate and exween a capitalist system burning fossil fuels and a socialist or anarchist system doing the same thing.
We are in an inescapable progress trap.We’ve built a ‘ bubble ‘ civilisation which is dependent on fossil fuels for it’s functioning.Stop using fossil fuels and over half the world’s population would be dead within months.Fossil fuels will become increasingly scarce during this century.
Continuing to burn fossil fuels will mean that we will have an uninhabitable climate this century,possibly within the next few decades. As Mike discussed in the last post,solar panels and wind turbines require the use of fossil fuels for the mining of the requisite minerals and for their manufacturing.
We had the intelligence to learn how to smelt metals and all the other steps that led to industrial civilisation,but could not forsee the inextricable predicament we are now in.The overwhelming tragedy is the destruction of ecosystems and extinction of innumerable life forms on our long journey to our current inescapable trap.

Reducing our carbon footprint would not be a problem under an eco-anarchic system. Lot’s of retooling to low-tech, reconfiguring of the food system, redistribution of wealth, etc. Idealistic? Yes, but so is believing in infinite growth on a finite planet.

Idealism is one thing.Delusion is another.Probably we would both agree that those who think it is possible to have economic or population growth forever on a finite planet are deluded.Many would disagree.
The way I read it at present is that there will be a massive population die off this century,possibly before mid century. Whether there will be some areas closer to the poles that will have a habitable climate is uncertain.
All I can say is that I wish you the very best of luck with your project.People have to do something with their time,and I cannot think of a more worthy use of ones time than to attempt to create a community with a more just social structure than capitalism.
I guess if there is one thing to be learned from our accumulated knowledge is that a long term sustainable civilisation cannot rely on fossil fuels.

A correction to my comment.
The climate system doesn’t differentiate between a CO2 molecule from a capitalist system burning fossil fuels and a socialist or anarchist system doing the same thing.
(This tablet has a mind of it’s own,it seems)

Another good read here xraymike. Live out the remaining time as best we can is about all that’s left to us, as there is no ‘fixing’ our inextricable dilemma. Enjoy the weather while it’s still pleasant and mild, realizing that it’s fleeting and unbearable change is on its way. i’m beginning to pull away from the continuous, not-too-distant horror realization, to being in the present time and place and living in the now more consciously.

i’ll continue reading the various blogs, but largely refrain from commenting as profusely as I have.

I am beginning to appreciate the view that the ecosystem and the very temporary industrial civilization are nothing more than vast self-assembled Rube Goldberg devices. Overly complex organizations that, in the end, do nothing more than ride the thermals within the entropic flow. A thin veneer of unnecessary complexity, self-assembled and put in motion by the flow of high grade energy to be released as low grade energy into space. The radiation of heat to space could be accomplished without any of the complexity, but there it is, cranking along today in all of its meaningful self-importance when, IMO, it is nothing but an unnoticed sideshow inside a small drop of water on the banks of a massive flowing entropic river. We assume that our “intelligence” is the crowning achievement of the universe when, in all honesty, the complexity that underlies it is simply an inconsequential side-effect happening in tandem with, but not necessary to the primary mandate of the universe. And now, as in the game Mouse Trap in which overly complex paths and assemblages are created to move a marble from point A to point B, some integral parts of the path are going to be lost and the marble will no longer find its terminus, but perhaps the players will re-create the game with a shorter and simpler paths, until finally there are no paths at all. Perhaps the game is over and the solar marble will simply bounce off our soon-to-be Venusian atmosphere or penetrate the thick veil and be reflected back out. In any case, when things become simpler it will be wise to not have too many superfluous steps between yourself and food and water.

The first Rube Goldberg device, the ecosystem, was long evolved and very complex and the marbles are sourced from the sun. It’s a competitive game to see who can obtain the most marbles and send them down the chutes and diversions, and if the behavior of the infrastructure so assembled does not result in obtaining more marbles, it fails and goes extinct. The second technological device, enabled by a mutant monkey, has grown suddenly and is insensitive to existing ecosystem relationships. Its marbles come from fossil fuels and this is a competitive game too to see who can arrange their chutes and diversions in the best manner to snare the most marbles. The marble paths in the ecosystem are being destroyed and eaten by the technological system which is empowered to do so by a one time fossil fuel burn-off. Even though the ape is made of cells and is thoroughly organic, it believes that its new technological marble paths will serve its needs better than the old organic ones, the ones that gave it a habitable environment and food to eat. The technological Rube Goldberg machine will collapse once it runs out of fossil fuel or damages the ecosystem so severely that no amount of energy or innovation in building technology can keep the game going.

And so one must humbly conclude that both life and it’s malignant offshoot, technological civilization, have very little importance even in the overall entropic theme of the universe. So sit back and watch the humans scuttle around building their chutes and course ways, trying desperately to capture more energy/money, blinded by passions to their suicidal course, and know, that within the larger framework, humans just don’t matter. The myth of progress culminating in intergalactic metastasis (following in the “alien’s” footsteps) is nothing but rubbish meant to serve the financial goals of those promoting it. Our only progress is towards total exhaustion of resources and consequent collapse and our final technological marvel of progress is a planetary gas chamber, life’s snuffing machine running full on today and every day until it’s over.

Dakar (AFP) – International medical agency Medecins sans Frontieres said Tuesday the world was “losing the battle” to contain Ebola as the United Nations warned of severe food shortages in the hardest-hit countries.

MSF told a UN briefing in New York that world leaders were failing to address the epidemic and called for an urgent global biological disaster response to get aid and personnel to west Africa.

“Six months into the worst Ebola epidemic in history, the world is losing the battle to contain it. Leaders are failing to come to grips with this transnational threat,” said MSF international president Joanne Liu…

…At current infection rates, the agency fears it could take six to nine months and at least $490 million (373 million euros) to bring the outbreak under control, by which time over 20,000 people could be affected…

In the Harald Welzer lecture I posted above he also makes an interesting point that in Germany there is a very broad consensus that we, as in the whole race, are fucking up the planet beyond all repair, with climate change and carbon emissions being one of the biggest concerns.

And yet, despite this high level of environmental awareness and ecological literacy, the average German goes about their day to day life freely consuming fossil fuels as though there is no tomorrow, such as driving the kids to school in the SUV, etc.

He compares this “situational framing” to the discussions the German soldiers had about the atrocities during the war. Driving a car is every bit as much of an atrocity against countless future generations as anything that happened in WWII, and yet people who are full cognizant of this fact continue to drive cars. After all, how else are they going to get anywhere in our infrastructure, a trillion dollars of prior investments built out over decades, exclusively for the use of people in cars?

A similar situation has developed in the big “green” activist organizations. They have totally sold out to corporate interests in the name of “progressive” politics, with some even advocating for natural gas fracking and nuclear energy because, well, it’s better than burning coal. Isn’t it?

This is creating quite a bit of cognitive dissonance in their constituents, as discussed by Naomi Klein in this Island Earth Journal interview about her upcoming book:

One other interesting takeaway from the Harald Welzer lecture is a point he made about how extrodinarily successful capitalism has been in compartmentalizing the environmetal crisis.

Namely, the way in which an entire industry of specialists, UN delegates, ministries, activists, and journalists have sprung up to “address” the existential crises of climate change, pollution, and resource depletion.

The primary activity of this self-sustaining industry is endless analysis, discussions, and conferences, none of which has anything to do with the hard (verging on impossible) work of actually changing our behavior, at least not in any meaningful way.

These seemingly pointless activities are a result of the primary purpose of this industry, which is to provide cover for business as usual. As long as it is understood that there are specialists “looking at the problem” then people can feel comfortable in going about their fossil-fueled business. No one need give up any of the perqs of living in a wealthy industrialized nation (such as flying to distant climate change conferences), and capitalism continues to thrive.

The gravity of the world’s current extinction rate becomes clearer upon knowing what it was before people came along. A new estimate finds that species die off as much as 1,000 times more frequently nowadays than they used to. That’s 10 times worse than the old estimate of 100 times.

I know this sounds like a techno-optimist’s wet dream, but there is already a massive and ongoing global effort to replace human labor with robots. Right here and right now.

Humans Need Not Apply

What is missing from this story is the very real possibility that industrial output will collapse sometime in the next decade (or next year!) due to the diminishing returns of resource depletion, as successfully modeled by the Limits to Growth study some 40 years ago.

Who would buy all the consumer products if almost no one has a job? The whole deal is based on ever increasing consumption; grow or die. Grow or die as a business, grow or die as an economy. It’s already gasping and sputtering. No doubt they have the technological capability (that’s all these fuckheads do 24/7) but, they are out of time to do it at scale. Amazing how they all fail to see that it is all still powered by dirty 20th century power plants with a few pollution control devices to remove the solids but not the co2.

Carlin is the best. I had one of those note books going during my 7 years in America. How is it you guys can produce both some of the worst most despicable people and ideas and some of the most interesting and wonderful people and things too? What a crazy country. In spite of all my criticisms, I am saddened to see her fall so fast. No doubt Canada can catch up quickly; we won’t escape the next economic crash and given how we have proven to be a huge moral failure on the environment the rest can follow just as quick. We are the latest Petrol Whore. Guess who are Daddy is?

…more new coal-fired power plants have been built worldwide in the past decade than in any previous decade, with no sign of slowing down, the study says.

Those existing coal-fired power plants emit billions of tons of CO2 each year and account for about 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — double that of the transportation sector. In the U.S. alone, burning coal emitted 1.87 billion tons of CO2 in 2011, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Worldwide, coal-burning released 14.4 billion tons of CO2 in 2011.

But the study extends those emissions out to the full lifespan of each of the existing power plants — 40 years per plant — and estimates that together they will spew out 300 billion tons of CO2 before they are retired, up from 200 billion tons of CO2 emissions that were committed from the power plants that existed in 2000, the study says…

…“Bringing down carbon emissions means retiring more fossil fuel facilities than we build,” study lead author Steven Davis, assistant professor of earth system science at UC-Irvine, said in a statement. “But worldwide, we’ve built more coal-burning power plants in the past decade than in any previous decade, and closures of old plants aren’t keeping pace with this expansion.”…

…The study says that despite international efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, the global power sector’s CO2 commitments are growing 4 percent each year, and have not declined at all since 1950.

As developing nations like China and India and other countries become more industrialized and build more and more coal-fired power plants—China and India account for more than half of all the coal used on the planet—the world is being committed to more and more CO2 emissions in the coming years…

Every addict I ever knew (and know a lot) never attempted to change until they almost destroyed themselves and put their families through great suffering. All of us lied for years pretending we were in control. Many never made it. Seeing the same thing here.

He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despair, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Agamemnon, Aeschylus

You echo my experience Apneaman. I have been active in AA since 1960. It saddens me that recovery is so difficult, even with the best of helps. I see addiction as one of the central problems of humankind. This understanding does not make me optimistic about our collective chances of recovery….

The troops numbers don’t add up for one thing. NATO is about to move 15,000 troops into Eastern Ukraine for “exercises” (the US sure can’t commit very many because they’ve already committed all their troops to at least a dozen other conflicts). I don’t think they’re very likely to cross the Russian border or even fire on the separatists. Not with them facing the potential of 150,000 Russian troops right across the border.

It’s all posturing by Obama and NATO leaders. And Putin knows it – which is why he’s so calm and collected and treating the whole thing as a joke.

This is true, but I question how far Obama is willing to go to protect Hunter Biden’s oil and gas investment. For the last week or so the Kiev coup has been on the verge of collapse, with massive troop desertions and citizen protests in Kiev. According to RT, Poroshenko has agreed to a “ceasefire regime” though there seems to be some disagreement over the wording: http://rt.com/news/184716-poroshenko-ceasefire-ukraine-putin/

The idiots in Washington have risked our collective demise more than once. I don’t think there is any limit to their madness in their insane lust for full spectrum dominance of the world. This hubris and the blindness that accompanies it makes their games truly dangerous. These deluded power elites still seek first strike nuclear capability as the ultimate weapon to trump all “enemies”. Having nukes next door to Russia is part of that dream.

Wild boar exceeding the German limit of 600 bq/kg were found in the region of Saxony. The boar have been being tested since 2012 with some dozens of times over the limit. In a year more test over the limit than below even decades after Chernobyl. The Saxony region is 700 miles from Chernobyl yet still harbors this ongoing problem. Foods such as mushrooms and wild berries are still considered unsafe to eat in Germany.

OK. That did it for me. Until today, Reuters has been my browser home page for years. So today I posted my first comment about an article referring to the Fast Food Worker strikes. Something about a Career With The King….clearly, they didn’t dig it. They refused to post it.

Then I saw THIS post about German boars. I have some experience (confrontational) with these creatures. I understand that everywhere there’s lot’s of piggies. Living piggy lives. After lurking here for a while, I have experienced a sea change.

I’ve known that our way of life was fading since the Oil Embargo of ’73. Who here can say that their home town has been the same since that happened? But, now that I am on the backside of my life, I realize that habitat is ALL.

My German boar experience is truly tragic. While pulling guard duty at a NATO ammo point, I had to kill the boyfriend of the post’s pet pig, “Wilma”. Our Polish cooks said
“She’s a nice piggy”. (Polish cooks? Oh, what a tangIed web we weave…) I believe it to be a jealous rage on the part of “Big Red”. It was the kind of thing that the operational briefings didn’t cover. I was feeding Wilma a C Ration biscuit in exchange for allowing me to clean off my boots in her bristly fur, when Big Red (a well known pig-thug by the locals) suddenly came out of the woods and charged me.

Hey! You’re a pig. I have an M16…WTF?

I had to put Big Red down. The paperwork was endless. It haunts me to this day.

So, I truly appreciate the updated information about Schwein. I’m glad that they are still hangin’ in there.

And that’s what I did to PROTECT your right to choose between a Ford and a Chevy.

We are all from Manhome. How do you know that we would not
have caught up with you if we had all stayed at home together?
—D’Joan

Our philosophy, morality, law and justice, and our technology, are anthropocentric.

Anthropocentrism is killing our beautiful planet.

And, if you want to be anthropocentric about it, it’s killing us, too.

All who profit from anthropocentrism—which is all of us—naturally resist this realization, and those who profit most most so.

But at the very least, what can we make of our attitude and practice against those just of the other animals who show awareness and emotion, and who even dream, which is all of the mammals, the birds, and, of the reptiles, tortoises at least?

And does the rest of Nature have no right to existence, because it is less sentient, or we are more so? Or if only because we can profit by destroying it, or scanting with contempt its simple claims to existence, a place to live, places and something to eat?

Is our human first achieving on our beautiful planet, though no effort of our own, moral freedom and a capacity for logic, only to be used to make us the most vicious of predators, predators by choice?

Predators so vicious that in the end we take our beautiful planet and ourselves down in our viciousness?

Let us see where anthropocentism in our philosophy, morality, law and justice, and in our technology, the “tunnel vision” of all of which becomes ever more patent, has led and is leading us to.

We breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide or we die, and carbon dioxide is removed from the air, its carbon trapped in reservoirage of plant and animal, and its oxygen re-released into the atmosphere, by the phytoplankton of our oceans and by our forests, yet over the last century over half of all phytoplankton has been lost, and at least as much forest, to our activities.

We indeed see now global business attacking the great rain-forests of the world, upon which carbon dioxide removal and carbon reservoirages we depend, with ever-more-aggressive technologies, forests once protected by their forbiddingess to human settlement and “development” (our concept of an “undeveloped forest” befits us), and even the small human populations eking out ancient existences in those are being pushed out or exterminated by such commerce.

And our oceans are being heated by greenhouse warming from fossil-fuel carbon-dioxide injection into the atmosphere, resulting in the loss of over half of our global phytoplankton over the last century, forty percent of the North Atlantic’s in the last half-century:

We are raising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere at a rate unprecedented on our planet, largely due to our extraction of fossil fuels from the Earth’s crust and burning them to inject ever-greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while destroying our beautiful planet’s ability to remove that carrbon dioxide by our murders of our oceans and forests, which last not only throws away our forests’ abilities to remove carbon dioxide but converts the carbon reservoirs which those forests represented to additional carbon dioxide, the result of all of which is an unprecedented greenhouse warming, die-off of phytoplankton, and further destruction of our beautiful planet.

And our recent and present exterminations of species has accelerated to the point where it is now commonly compared to the great extinctions of Earth’s past. Even the attempts by some less narrow are limited to an appalling degree: The “Endangered Species Act” of the United States, under constant attack by the anthropocentric since its adoption (and it would never be adopted today), only protects species that are reluctantly deemed endangered, and removes that protection once they returned to a population-level deemed (by dubious metrics) no longer needful thereof, when they can once again be preyed upon and their habitats destroyed, in practice setting “endangered” status as a minimum wildlife population. Indeed, the more noticeable and attractive species reluctantly dubbed endangered around the world seem only to become thereby targets of more aggressive predation and commerce due to the “scarcity value” of the products of their deaths, with no real international criminalization or punishment of such commerce.

Finally, we now tinker freely and happily with genetics, apparently knowing all there is to know about genetics, including genetic transfer and its dynamics, and the collective global genome and its dynamics.

All of these arise from our use of old technologies, and introductions of new, without consideration other than the anthropocentric.

And all of these might have been tolerated by our beautiful planet, were not our numbers now so great.

Our refusal to admit in our philosophy, morality, law and justice, and in our technology, that our beautiful planet is limited and cannot tolerate infinite numbers of us, is by any standard an irresponsibility to the highest degree of criminality, were we to be judged by anyone other than ourselves, and under any real morality, law and justice, other than the anthropocentric:

There should be not only population law but population-density law as well; where do you see any sign of such, in our anthropocenric paradise we are building for ouselves and those trapped with us on our beautiful planet?

Two paradigms of anthropocentric “tunnel vision” and its results are the settlement of already dry environments like Southern California and Southern Australia bringing on drought, fire and destruction by deforestation leading to the lack of ground-level cooling through shade and water-release and by simple heat of population, and the very common sight of commerce seeking to profit from the beauty of spots around the world by building hotels over them, in the case of oceanside resorts pouring their sewage and dumping their garbage into the ocean.

Algae, encountering a concentration of nutrient, often nowadays due to our contemptuous pollution of waters with agricultural fertilizers, will grow and reproduce as rapidly as possible, until it exhausts not only the nutrients involved, but even the oxygen supply in the water, after which it all dies (killing other oxygen-dependent species in the water as well), in “bloom and bust”:

Are we as a species no more intelligent or moral than algae?

Which is to say, can we rise morally as a species above anthropocentrism, in our philosophy, morality, law and justice, and in our technology, to become a blessing rather than a curse to our beautiful planet?

Jordan Pearson

September 4, 2014 // 03:50 PM EST

The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the worst in history, and the death toll just surpassed 1,900. Previous WHO estimates indicated that the outbreak would end mid-fall, but the situation is quickly spiraling out of control and into a sea of unknowns.

The “Ebola epidemic is the largest, and most severe, and most complex we have ever seen in the nearly 40-year history of this disease,” World Health Organization director general Margaret Chan said in a special briefing yesterday. “No one, even outbreak responders, [has] ever seen anything like it.”

“What happened was that we were modelling the dynamics of the evolution of diseases—of pathogens—and we showed that if you just add a very small amount of long-range transportation, the diseases escape their local context and eventually drive everything to extinction,” Bar-Yam told Motherboard. “They drive their hosts to extinction.”

A cascade of infection starting in Africa’/NECSI

Bar-Yam says he has informed the WHO and the CDC of his findings, but they haven’t listened, he said.

“I just gave a lecture to the World Health Organization in January and I told them. I said, there’s this transition to extinction and we don’t know when it’s going to happen,” Bar-Yam explained. “But I don’t think that there has been a sufficient response.”

Normally, the spread of a predator—and this is as true for Ebola as it is for invasive animal species—is stymied when it overexploits its prey, effectively drying up its own food source. In rural areas like those where the current Ebola outbreak is centered, diseases tend to contain themselves by wiping out all available hosts in a concentrated area.NECSI

“The behavior of an individual in a major metropolitan area in terms of engaging with the health care system depends on a lot of different factors,” Bar-Yam explained. “A reasonable person might behave in one way, but another person will behave in another. We don’t know what happens if someone with Ebola throws up in a subway before that gets cleaned up and people understand that happened because of Ebola.”

Panic is never a wise thing to incite, because it can result in exactly the kinds of unpredictable behavior that Bar-Yam is warning us about. However, a healthy amount of fear is a different matter.

“The question becomes, at what point do we hit the panic button? What does it look like to hit the panic button?” he said.

Bar-Yam’s suggested approach to containing the outbreak is radical, he admits, and flies in the face of the WHO’s nonplussed reaction to Korean Airlines, which stopped running flights into Kenya last week. According to the WHO, halting flights to West Africa makes it difficult for healthcare experts to make it into the region to help. Bar-Yam agrees, but maintains that the danger of the disease coming back with them is too great a risk.

“They’re saying they need a large number of healthcare professionals to go there and deal with this. But that doesn’t mean that people have to leave there,” he said. “One sets up a one-way transportation system where people can go there to deal with the disease.”

It’s a prescription that is likely to bristle healthcare experts who’d love to help Africans suffering from Ebola without necessarily signing their own death certificate. However, Bar-Yam said, the possibility of Ebola making it into a metropolitan area is far more grim than any potential containment efforts.

While the outbreak response thus far has been more or less handled on an individual basis, treating cases as they pop up while simultaneously studying the infection, a containment attempt to limit movement in and around the diseased area is a systemic response, and that’s exactly what’s needed.

“If the disease comes to an urban area in the United States, the targeted response of addressing individuals who have the infection is not the same as a systemic response that addresses the ability of the disease to spread,” Bar-Yam said. “We need to have the knowledge and understanding of how to do a systemic response.”

Mike, as you know, I think you are a gifted writer. And yet, your antagonism towards capitalism, and reciprocal favoring of socialism, begins to expose you as an “enthusiast” in the older, more critical sense of someone not considering all angles.

For instance, much of your writing could serve as parallels to the anti-red diatribes so prevalent in the US during the 50s. Just replace some phrases – form either era – and it would be difficult to distinguish between which system is either inherently evil or promisingly virtuous.

My belief is that all systems of governance are inherently corrupt. Hayek makes a great point in the RtS about socialism (which ironically becomes true for capitalism as well): concentrate sufficient power, and it will attract those who have no regard for the pubic weal, but are simply interested in control for power’s sake.

That being said, James wrote a great reply to a previous comment over at Gail T’s blog:

“The intentional misleading of the masses by the patrician class (most of which are clueless) to protect the proletariat’s emotional well-being is only a self-serving subterfuge aimed at maintaining order and subservience.”

In my opinion, this is the absolute key, the critical crux of the matter. No matter what system of political/economic organization, the patrician class will invariably resort to both physical threats of violence, and mount full frontal propaganda campaigns simply to retain power. It may expressed as beneficial or benevolent towards the lumpen’s plight/position in life, but make no mistake, it’s simply a self-serving vehicle to maintain order and control.

The very first archaea all those billions of years ago had to divide & fragment (ie grow) in order to survive as a kingdom. It’s the nature of the universe – to ascribe it to some kind of artificial human construct like capitalism/socialism is to miss the point, again made by James:

“And so one must humbly conclude that both life and it’s malignant offshoot, technological civilization, have very little importance even in the overall entropic theme of the universe. So sit back and watch the humans scuttle around building their chutes and course ways, trying desperately to capture more energy/money, blinded by passions to their suicidal course, and know, that within the larger framework, humans just don’t matter.”

It’s what we are, what we were born to be; once you come to that conclusion, then it’s easier to pull up a chair, like Carlin, and watch the freak show with bemused interest.

Anarchists are similar to Marxists in most respects, but oppose the hierarchical rule of the state which, as you say, simply concentrates power back into a political party. This is why I have converted to social anarchism.

“Firstly, anarchists have very clear ideas on what to “replace” the state with (namely a federation of communes based on working class associations). Secondly, that this idea is based on the idea of armed workers, inspired by the Paris Commune (although predicted by Bakunin).” – link

And what a freak show it is. I was just thinking today that technological civilization never could have arisen from dilute solar energy as did biological life. Civilization always had to nourish itself by decimating large stocks of stored energy and resources, largely because of the human scale. Most of biological complexity is within the diminutive cell and solar energy can easily run the machinery with the interception of photons. But solar would never have been concentrated enough to make anything happen at the human scale, we had to eat the whole enchilada to get anywhere, like building Moai on Easter Island or pyramids with a few priests at the apex. Our scale of development must eat and destroy to maintain complexity and complexity provides us the tools to eat and destroy. If we had collapsed after deforesting the planet and using the soils without discovering fossil fuels, we may never have had enough surplus to support all of the engineers, inventors and tinkerers that brought us so many more ways to destroy life on the planet. J. Robert Oppenheimer may have been standing at the top of a temple praising the sun instead of thinking about nuclear physics. “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Humans are an integral part of a technological juggernaut that will perish because of its success, just like the malignancies that occasionally see fit to grow exponentially in our bodies. Unlike the invading cancerous cells of organisms, humans can ruminate upon and mark the progress of their own cancerous infiltration of the ecosystem. See all of the freakish, superfluous complexity expressed within the tumors to humor an insane and rapacious ape and then ask yourself, “Is this how it all ends?”, with ICBMs, 450 hp, 5,000 lb. prickmobiles in twelve different colors, doggie couture, and enough plastic water bottles to girdle the globe? What a shame.

Quote: “The villagers began to ask for medical help complaining of drowsiness, memory loss and hallucinations. All of them were diagnosed with ‘encephalopathy of unknown etiology.'”

Quote: “Specialists excluded infectious and bacterial factors and assured that the radiation background in the village was within normal limits. The maximum permissible concentration of salt and heavy metals was not exceeded.”

Quote: “In May this year, officials at the Ministry of Health said that one of the possible causes of ‘sleeping sickness’ in the village of Kalachi could become a high concentration of vapors in basements during the heating season.”

Quote: “After waking up, the children were behaving inappropriately. They suffered from delusions and hallucinations; some had to be tied up as it seemed that they intended to hurt themselves.”

Note: About 60 people have been afflicted. They fall unconscious, experience memory loss, have hallucinations, and when they wake up they’re ‘not the same’ and do crazy shit, like hurting themselves. This sounds very much like hydrogen sulfide poisoning, which is a broad-spectrum poison but does the most damage to the neurology, the brain. They’ve eliminated pretty much every possibility EXCEPT an environmental toxin. The mentioning of basements is worth noting since hydrogen sulfide, a heavier-than-air gas, will tend to accumulate in basements when it infiltrates buildings. Also, children, being smaller than adults, tend to succumb easier to toxins.

12,000 endangered saiga antelope dropped dead on May 27 in 2010 in Kazakhstan too. That was one of the events that woke me up. They all died in the same area. Since they’re grazers, that doesn’t happen due to disease – they’d have been scattered over a wider area as the weakest succumbed and then the next weakest and so on, as they moved. So whatever killed them did so very quickly and was 100% fatal. That’s when I asked myself: could one of these ancient H2S-methane extinction events be underway now? I’ve seen plenty enough since then to be certain that that is indeed the case. Your government has been preparing, as best they can, for widespread human die-off and an unsurvivable surface of the Earth. I guess they just don’t think it’d be advantageous if YOU knew what was going on…

I started reading ‘Sapiens'(Harari) yesterday.Some might be interested in this quote from chap.5.:
‘Rather than heralding a new era of easy living,the agricultural revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers.
Hunter -gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways,and were less in danger of starvation and disease.The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind,but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.Rather,it translated into population explosions and pampered elites.The average farmer worked harder than the average forager,and got a worse diet in return.The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.’
Although I have spent some time here defending the hunter – gatherer system as the only long term sustainable system our species has,when we examine the record of devastation of ecosystems and the extermination of innumerable other life forms,even under the hunter-gatherer system,we really are a ruthless brutal species.
From the viewpoint of the Earth and our fellow species,we should have been named something like Homo cataclysmus.

“What’s interesting from a Flatland point of view is that the four “biggest threats” to humanity all arise from human technological cleverness. And if you look at the picture of the Flatland brain I drew above, you will see something I call the technological instinct in the unconscious. That conjecture derives from the observation that humans, presented with some intractable, self-created problem, always seem compelled to apply technological fixes when behavioral changes are clearly called for. In such cases, we hypothesize that unconscious processes proscribe or inhibit the required changes.” Dave Cohen – Decline of Empire

It seems reasonable that any type of growth inhibiting behavioral negative feedback would not come about as it would favor competing groups of humans. Even though, in some portion of our brains we can reasonably determine that our continued growth in population and consumption will destroy us, we cannot voluntarily inhibit behaviors that are immediately rewarding and have traditionally served us with survival over our relatively brief technological existence. Of course, prior to technology, there really wasn’t a reason to voluntarily hold back, nature was doing that for us and all other species. But as we became cancerous with technology, without adequate natural restraints, we grew like tumors in a body. We cannot stop ourselves from using technology to eat the entire ecosystem and our reasoning, warped by optimism bias, is insufficient to shackle the sub-conscious mind which is running the human organism. In fact, the subconscious can change or push off stage any idea that interferes with the reptilian brain’s access to dopamine reward and comfort. Most all of our political leaders are being operated by a subconscious mind in which hierarchy, domination, and fighting over resources is of prime importance, using the most advanced technology possible. Like a group of animals gorging and fighting over a carcass in the middle of the road at night, their prefrontal cortices can’t make sense of the headlights bearing down upon them.

September 2014 – UKRAINE – On Friday, as Russian Federation tanks and troops poured across the border into eastern Ukraine, Vladimir Putin talked about his country’s most destructive weaponry. “I want to remind you that Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations,” he said. “This is a reality, not just words.” Russia, he told listeners, is “strengthening our nuclear deterrence forces.”That same day, Putin used a term for eastern Ukraine meaning “New Russia.” So when he refers to repelling “any aggression against Russia” and speaks of “nuclear deterrence,” as he did on Friday, the Russian president is really warning us he will use nukes to protect his grab of Ukrainian territory. For more than a generation, nuclear weapons were considered defensive only. In a few short sentences on Friday, however, Putin made these devices offensive in nature, just another tool to be employed by an aggressor. And to highlight his threat, on Aug. 14 at Yalta, the Crimean city he had seized this year, Putin mentioned “surprising the West with our new developments in offensive nuclear weapons about which we do not talk yet.”

Also in Yalta, where the Duma was meeting, the Russian leader spoke about renouncing the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the U.S. and Russia. The treaty outlaws ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 300 and 3,400 miles and is a foundation of the post-Cold War peace. It is one thing to talk about withdrawing from the pact—Putin has been doing that since 2007—it is another to violate it, which Putin has apparently been doing since 2008, when Russia began testing cruise missiles again. And when the State Department’s Rose Gottemoeller raised the concern in May of last year, Russian officials tried to shut down the dialogue. According to The New York Times, they “said that they had looked into the matter and consider the issue to be closed.” “Administration officials said the upheaval in Ukraine pushed the issue to the back burner,” the paper reported of the INF violation. Putin, with his comments Friday, just moved it to the front of the stove. And not just in the European kitchen. If Putin manages to intimidate the West with his not-so-veiled promises to incinerate Ukraine’s defenders, other aggressors may think they too can employ his threatening tactics. For instance, both North Korea and China have recently talked about unleashing Armageddon. –Daily Beast

The article from the Daily Beast is complete bullshit. No tanks have poured across the Ukrainian border. The whole article is full of lies. If one wishes to understand what is going on in Ukraine go to sott.net. US/EU propaganda is really absurd in this regard. Think: US drive for world dominance, pipelines, the economic threat of the BRIC’s, cold warrior leftovers, the “pivot to Asia” etc.

That question was asked over and over again at the “Flagstaff and Ferguson” community and panel discussion Friday at the Murdoch Center.

It was hosted by Northern Arizona University’s Philosophy in the Public Interest to discuss what the Aug. 9 killing of an unarmed black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., means for Flagstaff residents.

“This sparked concern around the nation not only because of the event itself, but because the challenges that Ferguson faced that led up to this event are faced by communities around the nation, including Flagstaff,” said moderator Andrea Houchard of Philosophy in the Public Interest.

More than 100 people of all backgrounds packed into the Murdoch Center for the discussion, including community members, activists, NAU students and faculty, City Council members and members of the Flagstaff Police Department.

* * *

Panelist Timothy Swanson, pastor at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in Flagstaff, talked about his experiences marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago in the 1960s. Racism, he said, was an obvious back then, with police violently oppressing those who opposed segregation, but times have changed.

“It’s not that way anymore,” Swanson said. “Now, it’s covert and I think it’s more dangerous than when it was overt.”

NAU criminology and criminal justice professor Luis Hernandez was also on the panel. He talked about the racial and socioeconomic disparities that boiled over into protests in Ferguson with the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

“As this class thing becomes stronger, the police are the ones who have the role to maintain the class line and the color line,” Hernandez said. “And they are put in a situation where people have had enough.”

He talked about Ferguson as a continuation of a long series of racially biased police practices and police shootings of young black men.

* * *

Panelist Frederick Gooding Jr., a professor in NAU’s Department of Ethnic Studies said Ferguson was a public reminder of what people privately know goes on every day. He gave a brief history of racism in America dating back to the way the first European settlers used slaves to build their communities. He also talked about how they tried to justify slavery using fallacious philosophical, religious, scientific and legal arguments about the differences between races.

“The point is, ever since the early European settlers first came to start a civilization, there’s been this relationship with people of color — namely black or brown — whereby they had to be controlled, they had to be tamed in order for the dominant society to maintain power,” Gooding said. “We all know this.”

Even though slavery is no longer legal, he said, white Americans have been conditioned to fear black and Latino Americans.

Gooding shared a story about how he was called to the principal’s office after his son got in trouble for inappropriately placing his hands on other students — during a touch football game. People in the audience started laughing until Gooding cut them off with one blunt statement.

“It’s not funny,” he said. “It’s my life. It’s the daily indignities of the reality that people have to go through that remains invisible to many.”

* * *

Gooding also talked about the gap between how the law is applied to white people and how it is applied to minorities. For instance, he mentioned being pulled over three times in the first month he lived in Flagstaff.

“I understand that black and brown do commit crimes,” Gooding said. “I’m not saying they’re above the law. But the question is, how do we apply the law? If you want to find drugs, all you have to do is simply go to Beverly Hills.”

Gooding said racial minorities experience a duality where they are excluded based on their race even though they are Americans. White people, on the other hand, experience duplicity, he said.

“You know exactly what the hell is going on,” Gooding told the white members of the audience.

He then challenged white people to have difficult conversations with their white friends about racism and white privilege.

“Hopefully, what this will do is repeat another cycle of what we’ve seen in the past as far as people coming together working for a common cause,” Gooding said.

* * *

Although some of those who spoke in the panel and the audience expressed optimism that change was possible, there were also many expressions of fear and anger. Several people told stories alleging racial profiling by Flagstaff police.

“People have been murdered by the police in this community,” said panelist George Villas, a community leader who was born and raised in Flagstaff. “Racial profiling is a daily occurrence. Police brutality happens all the time. The police are going to tell you that doesn’t happen, but there are many people in this room who have experienced that.”

Villas said he had a strong feeling that nearly every black, Native American and Latino person in Flagstaff had experienced racial profiling by the police. He then shared a story about how he was arrested by Flagstaff police during a funeral procession on Easter Sunday in 2012.

“I was one of eight people doing traffic control because the police had left the funeral procession,” he said. “I was the only Chicano, so I was the only one arrested and I got beat up.”

Villas also talked about Kyle Garcia, 23, who was shot and killed by two anti-gang task force officers during a traffic stop in Sunnyside in 2006. Both officers were cleared of criminal charges after the Yavapai County authorities who investigated the shooting concluded the officers acted in self defense.

* * *

After the panelists were done speaking, the moderator then invited FPD Chief Kevin Treadway up to address the crowd.

“We know this is a work in progress,” Treadway said.

He explained that his officers do not use the military gear FPD has received from the government in the same way the Ferguson Police Department did last month, and stressed his push for compassionate policing and more cultural sensitivity training.

But when he said the number of complaints filed against officers had dropped over the past two years, that only 20 to 25 percent are sustained on a given year and only two racial profiling complaints were filed last year, tempers started rising.

Villas said the small number of racial profiling complaints and the even smaller number that are found by FPD to be sustained did not reflect what Flagstaff residents actually experience.

“So, racial profiling (complaints) last year, there were two?” Villas asked. “We have a room with 150 people here and three, at least, have spoken to their experiences with racial profiling by Flag PD. So colored people must be liars?”

Treadway said he cannot do anything about racial profiling unless people file complaints.

One Navajo man in the audience talked about the larger problem of indigenous people being displaced from their homelands.

Several other people in the audience jumped in with questions about the militarization of Flagstaff’s police force and comments on racial profiling.

There were also comments about civil rights abuses, homeless people being harassed by officers and whether Flagstaff was turning into a police state.

One audience member said she had heard that FPD officers would put their hand on their guns when they were stopping black men during traffic stops, but would take their hands away from their guns when stopping white men.

The moderator finally had to step in when audience members started raising their voices and shouting questions out of turn.

* * *

One question came from an audience member who wanted to know how Treadway expected to build community partnerships when there was such a large power disparity.

Treadway said he was looking into creating a citizen liaison committee for community members who may not be comfortable bringing their concerns about a police officer directly to FPD. He also got a round of applause when he said all patrol officers would be equipped with body cameras by the end of the month.

But several audience members and panelists said that was not good enough. Instead, they called for an independent citizens’ review board that would be able to review internal FPD records and hold the department accountable.

Swanson proposed more frequent meetings between whites and racial minorities, even if just to socialize.

“We just don’t get to know each other,” said Swanson, offering to host such events at his church.

Posted this on Scribbler’s site. Figured with all the hoopla about the upcoming march in NYC a look back was called for. Only after posting I figured that it probably won’t make it through moderation as the content of these articles would be too negative for most of those following Bob. Figured most of those following here probably have already read or know about the content of these pieces.

After watching the propaganda film Deception which focuses on the countdown to the march I realized that the filmmakers and march organizers are very adept at cherry picking which points they want to focus on. Any critical thinking going on probably did not make it to the film insuring that most of those watching it will never know they were spoon feed only half the story.

My Post:

With the fervor building about the Climate March I thought a look back at some insightful and hard hitting articles is called for. I always find before moving forward to check in to make sure we aren’t just going in circles ending up in the same place we started at.

In the news today: the world’s oceans and forests are no longer acting as carbon sinks. Naturally, I passed this on to the Greenpeace fundraiser who rang me a moment ago to solicit a donation. He didn’t like it when I told him, “It’s too late.”

I was unfortunate enough to listen to moment of Bill O’Reilly’s show on FOX last night. In it he said that Putin was just as bad as ISIS. Major propaganda point, that. Vilification. ISIS=PUTIN, PUTIN=ISIS, ISIS=PUTIN. How about HITLER=PUTIN=ISIS OR BANKERS=HITLER=PUTIN=ISIS or perhaps BANKERS=CANCER=DEATH or CORPORATIONS=BANKERS=CANCER=DEATH. Come on Bill, let’s hear the truth, that we really need to roll up a few derivatives and stick one in every ass on Wall St. and in Washington and light the fuses. KABOOM, INSTANT CHEMO.

As people work harder to save paper tokens of wealth we actually, because of burning irreplaceable fossil fuels in our metabolic rush to riches, become ever poorer. It’s that way when you base your civilization on a non-renewable fixed stock of energy. Here today, gone tomorrow. Perhaps we’ll try to wrestle Russia’s stocks from its control and perhaps Iran too, to maintain some dominance as we await mother nature’s foot to smash us all into the ground, like bugs, and then gleefully grind the lifeless exoskeletons of her failed experiment into dust, giving the one species, the renegade ape that dared sting her, its just reward.

Most of the dubious technological achievements of mankind have been systematic necessities to accommodate our ever increasing numbers, economies of scale in the acquisition, distribution and metabolic use of resources and energy and elimination of waste. ALL of the infrastructure you see around you has coal, oil and natural gas as essential ingredients and it will all eventually fall apart by entropy at the macro and micro scale. Now, when all of the fossil fuels are floating in the atmosphere in the form of CO2, like some malevolent ghost of times gone by, what are we going to use to sustain our rickety, deteriorating existence? And should our civilization die, in what manner shall it resurrect itself? And to do what? Thrash the biosphere again in a renewed celebration of spurious complexity and growth? Our entire raison d’etra is to design and build technology to accommodate our ever increasing numbers in the greatest comfort possible, to the detriment of the life that birthed us. We are an omniphagous cancer and we will enjoy our success until the biosphere begins its death rattle, then we will panic and die.

When you think of the ‘maximum power principles’ scuttling around.. the thermodynamic imperatives.. it’s “normal” that those who can live life constantly plugged-in shall do so, with X number of watts of exosomatic energy required 24/7 to ‘stay connected’ that weren’t necessary before.

I have found Jason W. Moore’s thoughts on the role of capitalism in our current environmental problems quite enlightening.
His argument builds from the capitalist expansion beginning in the early 1500s onwards, an expansion that fueled its growth through the availability of “the four cheaps,” which he defines as “labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials.”

Thing is, capitalism’s need for these cheaps is coming up against a wall, the drive for growth is meeting with exhaustion of the means for growth, while at the same time having cost the commons dearly, through the waste, pollution and instability that constant growth creates.

In fact, he argues that it would probably be better to call the current age the “capitalocene,” rather than the anthropocene, if one is to get a good handle on why we find ourselves where we are. In his writings, he also illustrates why capital is no longer working, but instead accumulating, particularly through the financial industries, as it begins to recognize the limits to growth based on “cheap nature.”

Dr. Malcolm Light suggests that if we do not cut our fossil fuel emissions by 80-90% over the next 10-15 years, we are methane toast. A switch to renewables is out of the question since it would require massive burning of additional hydrocarbons. Instead, we must cut 80-90% of our current economic activity. This creates a problem in that most people cannot “make ends meet” with their current salaries in a complex growth built to run on high octane, high EROEI fossil fuels. Metaphorically one might compare it to lowering the blood pressure in a human to 40/20 and telling them to get on with life. Additionally, any politician suggesting that everyone’s salary and consumption be cut by 50% will be jeered and thrown from office. The typical response from other political groups trying to take power will be “No bloody way, they’re lying, throw them out of office, hang them, damned environmentalists.” The emotional brain, the one that thrives on the sweet treacle of industrial production, will pick what it wants to hear and sweep reason and science under the rug. This only leaves a few options including involuntary reduction of human population, involuntary scuttling of industrial economies which leads to population reduction, or do nothing and let nature take its course.

For every press of the thermostat up arrow the temperature goes up one degree and we’ve pressed it many times with CO2, but the furnace has only just kicked in and the house is still relatively cool. We’re still hitting the up button and the furnace is cranking. There is no down button on our thermostat and no way to get out of the house. It’s getting hotter and now every time we hit the up button it jumps by four or five degrees, but we can’t help ourselves, because when we hit the up button we also get rewards like caged Skinner rats hitting their reward levers. The hotter it gets and the more uncomfortable we become, the more we press the thermostat up button thereby assuring our eventual demise. We fall to the floor, the proteins in our brain’s neurons are unraveling, the chemical messengers are not being delivered. We hallucinate and dream of the Arctic coolness, but it disappeared decades ago and finally chaos spreads into the respiratory centers and our breathing stops, metabolism stops, we are dead. Bacteria and fungi, rapidly evolved to thrive in the new hothouse environment begin to recycle their human fuel bonanza.

And what are all of your techno heroes going to do about this? Encourage you to ride around in a Tesla with an iWatch on your wrist chanting “fusion, fusion, fusion” while you watch the birds and trees around you spontaneously combust?

Interesting that you used the rat analogy. I read of a study that put rats in confinement with access to mood altering drugs and they got hooked. The rats were moved to an environment in which there was plenty of healthy food and lots of social company and all of the rats weaned themselves off the drugs.

Perhaps the answer to our dilemma is to simply share land and resources freely among ourselves so we don’t require this endless consumption as our mode of survival. China has roughly 48 million more square miles of land than we have in the States but only 59% of the arable land we have here. Their population is 1 billion and 48 million more than ours yet they exist. There are 2 arable acres of land per living person in the United States, enough to share among ourselves, and we have more than enough resources having used vastly more than our share of the world’s supply since the 1950s.

We can fairly smoothly shift to a social design in which resources are shared among the existing population so that none of us is existing desperately without them. I envision a vast landscape of free, self sustaining eco villages throughout the country modeled after college campuses with modest housing, shared laundries, shared kitchens, organic veggie gardens and small farming for the food supply, free education and health care, and an infrastructure all provided by 2-4 hours a day of community service by each of us in lieu of jobs and taxes. This would provide a stable population, an end to the need for massive consumerism, and a happy and peaceful solution to most of the problems we are facing economically, socially, and environmentally.

trishouse, this is a valid stop-gap, if not a long-term solution (the stable population part biologically doesn’t compute) and something I am actively trying to cobble together, with little success. Whereabouts are you? I am in Central VT. Write to me at lidiaseventeen c/o the company who exhorted “don’t be evil”.

If we want to bring a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior we need to create a community around them in which those new beliefs can be practiced, and expressed, and nurtured. Malcolm Gladwell said something like this in his book entitled The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference. I emailed you.

By now, it’s no secret that French economist Thomas Piketty is one of the world’s leading experts on inequality. His exhaustive, improbably popular opus of economic history — the 700-page “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” — sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. Some have called it the most important study of inequality in over 50 years.

Piketty is hardly the first scholar to tackle the linkage of capitalism with inequality. What sets him apart is his relentlessly empirical approach to the subject and his access to never before used data — tax and estate records — that elegantly demonstrates the growing trends of income and wealth inequality. The database he has compiled spans 300 years in 20 different countries.

Exactingly empirical and deeply multidisciplinary, Capital is an extremely important contribution to the study of economics and inequality over the last few centuries. But because it fails to address the real limits on growth — namely our ecological crisis — it can’t be a roadmap for the next.

Inequality and Growth

One of the main culprits of inequality, according to Piketty (and Marx before him), is that investing large amounts of capital is more lucrative than investing large amounts of labor. Returns on capital can be thought of as the payments that go to a small fraction of the population — the investor class — simply for having capital.

In essence, the investor class makes money from money, without contributing to the “real economy.” Piketty demonstrates that after adjusting for inflation, the average global rate of return on capital has been steady, at about 5 percent for the last 300 years (with a few exceptions, such as the World War II years).

The rate of economic growth, on the other hand, has shown a different trend. Before the Industrial Revolution, and for most of our human history, economic growth was about 0.1 percent per year. But during and after the rapid industrialization of the global north, growth increased to a then-staggering 1.5 percent in Western Europe and the United States. By the 1950s and 1970s, growth rates began to accelerate in the rest of the world. While the United States hovered just below 2 percent, Africa’s growth rates caught up with America’s, while rates in Europe and Asia reached upwards of 4 percent.

But as Marx observed in the 19th century, economic growth did little to reduce inequality. In fact, as Piketty demonstrates, wealth has grown ever more concentrated in the hands of the few, even as the pie has gotten bigger. Piketty developed a simple formula to illustrate how wealth gets concentrated: when the average rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) — in mathematical terms, when r > g.

Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, according to Piketty, the rate of return on capital exceeded that of growth, and inequality blossomed in the industrialized world. But in the 1950s, this trend began to shift — not because of redistributive economic policies, but rather as a consequence of historical calamities in the preceding decades. During this time, aggressive social, economic, and tax policies were ushered in by devastation and destruction.

With these policies set in place, the recovery efforts after the Second World War accelerated growth, which for the first time in recent history exceeded the rate of return on capital — that is, g > r — creating a middle-class.

A Mistaken Model

This was the period when economists and policymakers developed a fetish for economic growth, thanks in part to Simon Kuznets, an influential Belarusian-American economist.

Looking at data spanning from 1913 to 1948, Kuznets concluded — mistakenly, according to Piketty — that in the aggregate, economic growth automatically reduces income inequality. Kuznets argued that a rising tide of industrialization would at first create greater inequality as populations were left behind, but once they began to adapt to the new economic conditions, they would eventually gain access to more wealth as they became fully integrated in the new economic model — in essence closing the wealth gap.

It turns out, though, that the rich just keep getting richer.

This misinterpretation helped justify a quest for perpetual economic growth and free markets, paving the way for massive industrialization, accelerated climate change, and widespread environmental destruction, while simultaneously neglecting the very issue Kuznets set out to address: reducing income inequality.

In “Capital,” Piketty rigorously applies Kuznets’s analysis to a larger dataset and debunks the argument for perpetual growth. Instead, Piketty concludes that industrialization without any enforceable progressive taxation has actually created greater inequality.

Piketty thus forces liberal and conservative economists alike to rethink their models of growth. But if growth isn’t the answer, what is?

The Limits of Growth

Piketty prescribes a few remedies. But he does not take into serious consideration the limits to growth. He is a traditional Keynesian in this regard, which may be his biggest flaw.

His main prescription — a “progressive tax on global capital” — assumes that a 2-5-percent global growth rate is sustainable in the long run and, with a redistribution of capital, will reduce inequality. However, he concedes that a progressive tax on global capital is utopian. So instead, he’ll settle for a “regional or continental tax” as the first step towards a progressive tax on global capital — starting in the European Union.

Piketty’s solutions focus more on taxing egregious levels of wealth concentration than on the systemic conditions that incentivize the desire to accumulate egregious amounts of capital in the first place. He seems to believe that pushing tax rates high enough will deter CEOs from pursuing millionaire salaries, and that this can be done without hindering growth. The first is unlikely, and the second misses the real problem with growth.

Piketty spends about four pages of his 700-page tome talking around the limits to growth, but he fails to adequately address the fact that limitless growth — i.e., consumption — is completely unsustainable on a finite planet. Recent reports from NASA, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment conclude that the planet cannot continue on the same path of economic growth if it is to sustain human life.

What this means is that it doesn’t matter if we implement a progressive tax on capital because our planet will not sustain forever a growth rate of even 1 percent annually. A dead planet will support neither high earners nor tax collectors.

Towards a New Economy

All this leads to a larger conundrum.

On the one hand, we have extreme inequality, where many live on less than $2 a day while others have so much wealth that it would require several lifetimes to spend. On the other hand, we have a climate crisis that has imposed limits to growth, so we can’t grow our way into shared prosperity.

The traditional approach to inequality is to bring down those at the top while raising up those at the bottom. But to what level should we bring people, considering our finite planet?

Do we want everyone to live a mythical American middle-class lifestyle? Where every family of four lives in a two-car-garage home with a TV in every room, and every family member has a smart phone, tablet, and computer? Where they take a vacation to the other side of the globe once a year, and send their children away to a university and buy them a car when they are of age?

Is this the standard of living we want for every person on the planet? Obviously it can’t be — it would require at least five Earths.

Piketty is right that our political economy favors the growth of inequality, and that inequality in turn poisons our politics. But while we should aspire to create a society that shares its prosperity, we need to address a much bigger gap than the one between rich and poor. We need to address the gap between what’s demanded by our planet and what’s demanded by our economy.

At the center of the rapidly growing New Economy Movement are ecological balance, shared prosperity, and real democracy. If we can’t find a way to build all three, then the only economy worth measuring is the number of days we have left.

Thankfully, the New Economy Movement is seriously considering the four-fold systemic crisis — ecological, economic, social, and political — to identify a just transition to the next system. Piketty can show us part of the problem, but he can’t show us how to solve it on his own.

The scientific story of lithium’s role in normal development and health began unfolding in the 1970s. Studies at that time found that animals that consumed diets with minimal lithium had higher mortality rates, as well as abnormalities of reproduction and behavior.

Researchers began to ask whether low levels of lithium might correlate with poor behavioral outcomes in humans. In 1990, a study was published looking at 27 Texas counties with a variety of lithium levels in their water. The authors discovered that people whose water had the least amount of lithium had significantly greater levels of suicide, homicide and rape than the people whose water had the higher levels of lithium. The group whose water had the highest lithium level had nearly 40 percent fewer suicides than that with the lowest lithium level.

Almost 20 years later, a Japanese study that looked at 18 municipalities with more than a million inhabitants over a five-year period confirmed the earlier study’s finding: Suicide rates were inversely correlated with the lithium content in the local water supply.

More recently, there have been corroborating studies in Greece and Austria.
…

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OWS knows who really pulls the strings

"...the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington."

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm).
To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%."
- Albert Bates

Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]

The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]